The advancement of mobile communication devices and networks in recent years has allowed users of such devices to view different types of content directly on the users' mobile devices. Examples of such content include, but are not limited to, text, media and graphics content. Such content is generally displayed to a user via a display screen of the user's mobile device by a content-specific software application (e.g., a media player for viewing video content) or a general-purpose application (e.g., a web browser for viewing web page content) executable at the device. Many of the mobile devices in production today include touch-screen displays. A user's mobile device with a touch-screen display enables the user to manipulate the content being viewed. The touch-screen display allows the user to interact directly with the displayed content by “touching” the display (e.g., using a finger or stylus) in order to perform various functions. For example, the user may use different touch gestures to select and view portions of the displayed content including, for example, text content that may be selected for a copy and paste function.
To allow portability and handheld operations, many mobile devices generally have small display screen sizes and thus, provide a limited screen area for users to view and manipulate the content being displayed. As a result, user experience may suffer for mobile device applications in which certain types of content are displayed. In the copy and paste example above, the user may have difficulty selecting and copying the specific portions of text within a document or web page being displayed on the screen of the device due to the relatively small font size of the text being displayed on the device. Further, conventional techniques for selecting a portion of displayed text content can become a very cumbersome manual process for the user as such a technique may require a substantial amount of dexterity to appropriately select the specific portion intended by the user, depending on the size of the display screen and the amount of content being displayed.
Many devices offer the user the option of enlarging the displayed content by increasing the font size or the level of zoom. However, the increased zoom level or magnification is applied to the displayable content or content viewing area of the display screen as a whole, rather than just the portion of interest to the user. As such, the user may lose perspective or awareness of the location of the magnified portion of the displayable content relative to the content in its entirety. This may lead to inefficiencies and user frustration from having to continuously manipulate or change the size and or position of the content being viewed in order to find different portions of content that may be of interest.